The Joint Baltic American National Committee, Inc. (JBANC) was founded on April 27, 1961.
The Committee was founded during a period of great political and social upheaval: the Cold War had been going on for 15 years, and would last for another 30. The Berlin Wall would go up in just over three months. JFK had become U.S. President three months earlier. Sierra Leone declared itself independent that day from British rule. Colonialism was crumbling around the world, everywhere but within the expanding Soviet empire.
In 1961 it had been over twenty years since the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were occupied and illegally annexed by the Soviet Union. The Second World War had ended 16 years earlier in 1945, but the Baltic struggle would continue – in the forests and on the home front, but also across the Baltic Sea and further away across the Atlantic Ocean. The United States, thanks to the Welles Declaration of July 23, 1940, had not and would never legally recognize the Soviet takeover of the Baltic countries nor the legitimacy of Soviet rule. This non-recognition policy would last for over fifty years until 1991.
Lithuanians historically had a larger presence in America than Estonians and Latvians, primarily due to earlier waves of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Lithuanian American Council was established in 1915, and was reorganized in 1940 to address new wartime concerns and challenges.
The largest migrations, however, of post-war Balts arrived in the United States about ten years prior to JBANC’s founding, following the signing of the Displaced Persons Act into law in 1948 by President Harry Truman. This allowed tens of thousands of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians to come to the United States, mostly between 1948-1952. These newly-arrived Balts joined or set up organizations, schools, and cultural and religious institutions, and thus established their presence throughout the United States, from small farming communities to the largest urban centers, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. It was during this time, in the early 1950’s, when the American Latvian Association and the Estonian American National Council came into being.